Photo: Pam White; Paula Josa-Jones in “Auf Dein Eigenes Wohl”
How do you think of dance?
Is it shapes?
Steps moving across a stage?
Or is it the body
steeped in its years
on earth?
Is it the body inseparable
from everything?
Are you dancing now?
If you are breathing,
that is a start.
Are you listening,
to the sound of that breath?
Better still.
I took this picture in New Hampshire in October 2012 when I was campaigning for Barack Obama. This week I will travel north to campaign for Hillary.
In what has been a protracted assault of “noxious word spew” (Samantha Bee’s words – watch the Pussy Riot episode), I am feeling soiled, triggered, disgusted by the degradation of our discourse. What to do, what to do? I need to handle my rage before I go knock on doors.
So here is some of what I am doing, in no particular order:
Here is the thing. I LOVE Hillary. I love that she is human, that she is a fighter, that she has navigated the Class 5 rapids of 30 years of attack by a party defined by its ugly, entrenched misogyny. I love her laugh, her compassion, her ability to listen, her willingness to keep going, her devotion to women’s rights. I love that she speaks in sentences that actually make sense, and that she can respond her for to changing conditions and new perspectives (thank you Bernie).
So I am going to take my strong, albeit bruised heart in hand and go speak from that heart to strangers. I am going to do my best not to take anything personally. I am just going to put my head down and work. I am going to do this with old friends from previous campaigns, and new friends that I will meet.
This takes a lot of courage. I remember well the feeling of walking up to a door and not knowing what I would meet. It can be daunting, and in a climate of extreme political acrimony, it is downright scary My model will be Hillary, who gets up every day and faces the crazy music. I will heed Michelle Obama’s words and go high to the best of my ability.
And I will be posting from the road. So watch this space, and wish me luck.
Photo: Pam White
Spent the afternoon in Boston yesterday, performing at the Outside the Box Festival. It was very, very hot – 95 degrees. However, I was a “roving” performer, so I could choose my moments, choose my time and place. There was something wonderful and rigorous about being a part of this flow of people, discovering more about relationship, audience and the ephemeral, fleeting performative moment.
I found myself bowing, often to young black men and women. I have felt devastated by the happenings in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Dallas, and the long list of other beings and cities. I feel helpless, disconnected, even though my son in law is black and my granddaughter a beautiful blend of Nepali and African American. Perhaps the anonymous, concealed envelope of The Traveler allowed me to cross a bridge, even momentarily.
I want to connect, communicate. I want to say that your lives matter to me in a very personal and immediate way. It is not abstract. I want each and every one of us to have limitless opportunity, a deep sense of safety and nurturance, and the boundless ability to pursue happiness.
Bowing was a way of saying “Hello. I see you.” It is not enough, but it is a beginning.
Photo: Darial Sneed
I had the great privilege of performing the premiere of MAMMAL last weekend at the venerable La MaMa Theater in New York.
I first went to La MaMa around 1981 to see the brilliant Kazuo Ohno perform. Watching him slowly raise a single chrysanthemum into the air, his whole body a trembling stem is an indelible kinetic memory. It is also where I first met Eiko and Koma, who later, during a Delicious Moving workshop in the Catskills, dismantled and then re-calibrated everything that I had previously understood about all things performative. I had just finished the Laban program, and my body was full of spirals and space. I will never forget Koma saying tersely to me, “Just go down.”
Eiko came to my performance. It may be the first time that she has seen me perform. I was deeply honored by her presence, and by the opportunity to be dancing in this iconic space.
On the second day of the performance, while warming up, I suddenly felt the unmistakable presence of my old, wise stallion, Capprichio – in me, in the space. I felt his head, the weight of those bones, the mass of him. I remember thinking, “You can’t move like this.” And he showed me the quiver of himself, the wildness and the unpredictability.
I am reading Kent de Spain’s wonderful book, The Landscape of the Now. It is a breathtaking compendium of improvisational practices and reflections by the Big Ones: Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, Ruth Zaporah, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay.
MAMMAL is a choreography, but it is also an improvisation, and much shaped by what shows up in the room with an audience and how deep I can drop into that well as I set foot on stage. It is about gaze and stillness and impulse. Connection and curiously, faith – that the dance is there, and that I can let it come to me as I also plunge into it.
MAMMAL and the other two dances from OF THIS BODY, THE TRAVELER and SPEAK are coming soon to The Dance Complex in Cambridge, MA. It is the world premiere of THE TRAVELER, a piece that has been more than two years in the making. You can buy tickets here: Of This Body
http://ofthisbody.bpt.me/
Come and see!